Homer And Langley

Brilliant brothers Langley and Homer Collyer are born into bourgeois New York comfort in settled times, their home a fin-de-siècle mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, their future rosy. But before he is out of his teens Homer begins to lose his sight, Langley returns from the War in Europe with his lungs seared by gas, and when the death of their parents in the influenza epidemic of 1918 leaves the brothers orphaned, they seem perilously ill-equipped to deal with the new era.

E. L. Doctorow's novels include Andrew's Brain, Homer and Langley, The March, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate and The Waterworks. Among his honours are the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. He died in July 2015.

'Exquisite writing, an extraordinary story and a charmingly wry take on life and all its inconvenience INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'Beguiling ... Doctorow shows how each decade leaves a distinct thumbprint on the siblings, to the extent that one starts to regard them as an unwitting index of changing times in America at large GUARDIAN 'The interweaving of the epic and the domestic makes for a fascinating read DAILY MAIL 'Doctorow's work grants inner life to historical personages and revives the past in fine grained detail ... like Doctorow's best written earlier books, Homer and Langley prompts one to question the purpose of formal punctuation, familiar spelling and TLS